Technology visions are not new to the 300-plus-year-old kingdom. After Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” and Boris Johnson’s “Global Britain,” there is now talk of a “Unicorn Kingdom” or “Innovation Nation.”
London: the most important financial center for fintech
Recently, American tech groups such as Palantir, Open AI, or Anthropic London confirmed their London offices. Recently, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz also announced plans to establish a beachhead for its crypto investments on the Thames.
The City of London is considered the world’s most important financial center for fintechs. The UK government announced that the market value of the entire UK tech industry is $1 trillion; only the US and China can boast more. Tech investors brought to the country about 24 billion pounds last year, more than Germany and France combined. In the number of startups, the UK owns second place, just after the US.
Artificial intelligence as a cure
But the government won’t be satisfied with that. AI is the way to overcome the growth problems. “The one that doesn’t bother to play the industrial policy game will lose,” Diane Coyle, an economist at the elite Cambridge University, notes for the German business daily Handelsblatt.
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With its stagnant economy, the U.K. has been the growth laggard of the seven leading industrialized nations (G7) so far this year and, as in the 1970s, is once again being dubbed the “sick man of Europe.”
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), output per hour worked on the island has stagnated since the financial crisis in 2008, with a meager increase of just 0.3 percent per year. That’s just one-third of the already low average for G7 nations.
Rapid adoption of AI technology
The Alan Turing Institute unveiled a new AI strategy that focuses primarily on the use of smart machines in healthcare, environmental protection, and national security. “We want to harness the revolution in data science and AI and channel its energy into solving some of the biggest challenges facing our society,” Turing director Adrian Smith said for Handelsblatt.
All government departments are being urged to seize the opportunities offered by the new technology. In April, the British government had allocated 100 million pounds to accelerate the introduction of the technology. Modeled on the CERN nuclear research center in Geneva, there could be joint cutting-edge research into AI in a “controlled environment.”
More freedom after Brexit
With government aid of 500 million pounds, London is trying to persuade the Indian industrial group Tata to build its planned gigafactory for the production of batteries for electric vehicles in the UK. The government is also providing 900 million pounds to help build a supercomputer that will help develop the UK’s own BritGPT.
In the face of technological change, the U.K. cannot be satisfied with the status quo not only in AI, “but also in quantum physics, synthetic biology, semiconductors and much more,” Sunak said at the London “Tech Week” conference in mid-June.
Action has already been taken by the British government on the development of genetically modified foods. In England, it has been allowed to modify the DNA of plant foods for commercial purposes since March. Brexit now gives the British more freedom.
